Photography books of the year 2011: a snapshot of Christmas gift ideas

From the Ruins of Detroit to the New York subway, via Elin Høyland's touching portrait of two brothers and Pieter Hugo's haunting images of Rwanda, Sean O'Hagan looks back at his favourite photobooks of 2011

The ruined Spanish-Gothic interior of the cinema United Artists Theater in Detroit built in 1928 by C Howard Crane, and finally closed in 1974. Photograph: Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Strictly speaking, it was published at the very tail end of 2010, but it has been one of the most talked-about photobooks of this year. A formally brilliant and powerful document of the dramatic disintegration of a once-great American city over the last few decades.

Original photographs, family portraits and text combine in Léonie Hampton's record of her mother's "irrational rituals and behaviours" as, together, they struggle to clear the family house of a lifetime's accumulated artefacts. Intimate reportage at its most powerful.

Ten years on from her extraordinary first book, Aila, Kawauchi continues her journey into the heightened everyday. That same mix of intimacy and deceptively casual observation holds sway and the end results remain singularly beautiful.

A deftly observed portrait of the intertwined lives of two reclusive brothers, Harald and Mathias Ramen, who share a wooden house in a small village in rural Norway. A portrait of human interdependency and a glimpse of a fast disappearing way of life.

An image from The Heath by Andy Sewell.
Photograph by Andy Sewell, courtesy of James Hyman Photography, London

A beautifully conceived portrait of Hampstead Heath, a swathe of countryside in the heart of the capital. Sewell's mysterious, gloomy, ominous and oddly beautiful images of an in-between landscape are captivating. A limited edition self-published photobook that you may still be able to track down.

Patterson follows the trail of blood left by serial killers, Charles Starkweather and Caril Ann Fugate, across Nebraska and Wyoming in 1958 in a book that combines original images, found photographs, diary entries and and crime reports. As Luc Sante puts it in his essay, included in the book: "'ambiguous and unsettling".

Hugo photographed remnants of the Rwandan genocide which seemed to have seeped into the landscape in Vestiges of a Genocide. Photograph: Pieter Hugo/Courtesy of Stevenon, Cape Town/Johannesburg and Yossi Milo, New York

"How does one regard landscape ... where atrocity has ocurred?" asks Hugo in the book's introduction. The images therein provide the answer: a restrainedly powerful testament from a country where the dreadful events of the recent past seem to have seeped into the landscape.

Ackerman's third book confirms him as a rare talent with his own highly developed visual language which tends towards the gritty and impressionistic. The landscapes look edgy and threatening, the people alienated and on the edge of despair, but there is a strange monochromatic beauty here too.

USA. San Ysidro, California, 1979. Mexicans arrested while trying to cross the border to the United States. Photograph: Alex Webb/Magnum

A 30-year retrospective of a great, and often overlooked, American pioneer of colour photography who pays scant regard to genre boundaries, merging art photography, photojournalism and often complex street photographs.

Meadows is best known for travelling around Britain in a double decker bus in the early 1970s, and photographing the people he met. This book, compiled by Val Williams, gathers his other lesser-known bodies of work, including the Butlins by the Sea series from I972. Evocative, highly personal photojournalism from a true pioneer of postwar British photography.

An illuminating selection of Sternfeld's early colour work from 1969 to 1980 shot on Kodachrome and announcing many of the signatures of his later books. It shows both a good photographer becoming a great one and, as with the photographs of his contemporaries, Stephen Shore and William Eggleston, the emergence of colour as a medium in itself.

Finally, if you can afford it, a lavish box set of Eggleston's early colour work, selected from an archive of more than 5,000 Kodachromes and Ektachromes found in a safe in the master's house. The same store of images provided the raw material for his first book, William Eggleston's Guide, and here we see that groundbreaking aesthetic in the making.

Best reissues

Two classics of insider reportage and one seminal work by a pioneer of contemporary landscape photography.

Untitled by Bruce Davidson; from the book Subway published by Steidl. Photograph: Bruce Davidson

Subway is Davidson's visceral take on the New York underground system of the 1980s complete with beleagured passengers, Guardian Angels, graffiti and a palpable, all-pervasive sense of fear. A glimpse of a New York that is already long gone.

Koudelka brings to life the even older world of the Roma gypsies that he encountered in his travels in the late 1960s and early 1970s in images that resonate with mystery and ritual, romance and hardship.

In Candlestick Point, originally issued in 1989, Baltz brought his dispassionate gaze on a public space in California where the detritus of the city had spread into the suburbs and beyond. A characteristically uncompromising book that, like much of Baltz's work, details the growing hinterland where man made impinges on the natural world.

Another elegiac book, this time looking at the role of the photo album since Victorian times. Includes wonderful examples of the modern hand-made photograhic album from the likes of Danny Lyon and Jim Goldberg.